Wrong place, wrong time to catch 'Cats

Published: Friday, October 20, 2000

Instead of focusing on extending what had been a 25-game home winning streak, the Kansas State Wildcats go into Saturday determined not to lose consecutive home games for the first time since 1989, coach Bill Snyder's first season in Manhattan, Kan.

At least one assumes they are determined to make amends for their 41-31 loss last week to Oklahoma.

Either the Sooners made the Wildcats really mad or they softened them up for Texas Tech. Red Raiders coach Mike Leach isn't sure which.

"You never know," Leach said. "It just depends on how you bounce back, but certainly they have that potential. They're a good football team and have had a great season. They didn't play as well the first half as they would have liked, I'm sure. But they played a heck of a second half, and they're good anyway."

They're good enough that many expect a Purple Power muscle flexing in the 6 p.m. game Saturday. The betting line shot to K-State by 32 points, probably based on Tech's school-record 56-3 thrashing by Nebraska and the idea that the Wildcats would be particularly intense after a rare home loss.

Plagued by 17 missed tackles last week, the 10th-ranked Wildcats (6-1, 2-1 Big 12) get to see a Tech team that has been sort of a poor man's Sooners so far. The Raiders (5-2, 1-2) will try a lot of the same things as OU, but it's a stretch to think Kliff Kingsbury can hit 29 of 37 passes for almost 400 yards the way Josh Heupel did.

K-State defensive linemen Mario Fatafehi, Monty Beisel and Chris Johnson have eight, seven and six sacks, respectively, and put a lot of good licks on Heupel last Saturday.

The benefit to K-State is that it got to practice a lot of the same defensive packages from one week to the next.

"I don't think it can do anything other than give us some benefit, at least in our preparation," K-State coach Bill Snyder said. "Now, it's a two-sided coin, I'm sure. It probably would be an asset to Texas Tech as well, to be able to see firsthand what it is that hurt us defensively and how they might want to attack in perhaps some of the same ways."

The Raiders make no secret of the fact that for Lockett to hurt them, he'll have to do it on offense. Once Lockett returned punts for touchdowns in back-to-back games this season, the Raiders decided kicking to him was too risky. He averages 21.2 yards per runback.

"We're not going to let them have one that goes back all the way," Tech special teams coach Manny Matsakis said. "It's like, 'Why give them a cheap touchdown rather than (making them) earn it?' There's no reason to mess with this guy. He's the best there is."

That means another week of Tech punter Clinton Greathouse kicking toward the sideline, the way he did against Nebraska when Bobby Newcombe and Joe Walker were in town.

"It's a little more of a challenge," Greathouse said, "but at the first of the season Coach Matsakis made it clear to us that we are going to be direction-ing anyway. That's what we practice the whole time, from the start of the season 'til now. We've got to do what we've got to do."

Speaking of gotta-do's, the Raiders probably gotta pull an upset to keep alive any hopes of a Big 12 South Division title.

Unfortunately, there are better times to go to Manhattan, Kan., than the week after the Purple Cats have taken a purple bruise.